[AusNOG] Interstate Networking

[Robert Hudson]

A model I recently pushed to my employer was as follows:

Rack/s in a commercial datacentre in each capital city.  Dark fibre or L2
service between office in each city and the datacentre.  Megaport for
bandwidth between cities (your racks need to be in datacentres which are
on-net for Megaport).  SuperLoop as a dark fibre provider are related to
Megaport.  If you don't want to deal with the underlying providers
directly, there's a few businesses out there that will effectively bundle
the services you require into a single service (some are on this list and
will, I suspect, speak up).

My employer is currently part way there already.  I recently picked up a
dark fibre link between Mascot and the Sydney CBD for something like $1500
a month, over which we'll run 10Gbps.  Add a disparate path service for
about the same, and you''re looking at highly reliable L1 connectivity for
< $3k a month (and given what I know you'd pay for L2 services, let alone
MPLS, that is stupidly cheap - we were paying $3k per month for a 10Mbps
MPLS link with QoS, and $2200 a month for a 100Mbps L2 service) - about the
only thing that can go wrong with it is some idiot digs it up - and that's
why you have disparate path.  We then pay just over $1k a month for a
100Mbps Internet link in the datacentre (and that's all we can eat).

We could easily have gone into one of the DCs closer to Mascot had we not
been contractually obligated to stay in the Sydney CBD for the next 12
months, and then we'd have paid less for the dark fibre.  We've moved
everything but access-layer switches from the office to the datacentre and
have drastically cut the cost of running our IT infrastructure (a few $k a
month for rack space, verses the cost of hosting and running it all
yourself, you'd be surprised how quickly having rackspace in a dedicated
datacentre becomes cheaper than doing it properly yourself in your office).

With dark fibre being so cheap these days, and services like Megaport
offering significant bandwidth at prices that even 12 months ago people
thought was simply un-achievable, the old paradigms of corporate network
connectivity are starting to break down.  It's only going to get more
interesting when locations such as Singapore, Hong Kong and India
(regionally) start getting connected into networks such as Megaport, let
alone the US and Europe.

On 21 August 2015 at 14:41, Andrew Hawken <ahawken at roycesoftware.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Looking for some recommendations / discussion (not potential candidate
> providers just yet) with regards to interstate networking.
>
> My employer currently has an office in every state of Australia. Each
> office currently has an ADSL or EFM service (don't worry about why ADSL or
> EFM). The router at each location is connected back to HQ in Melbourne via
> a VPN tunnel. Each office is using the same ISP, however, we'd prefer
> something much more direct between each state office and HQ. Think 'hub and
> spoke'.
>
> Each office is pretty much in the middle of the CBD of each capital city.
>
> Not really concerned about costs or technology (they'll play a factor
> later) at this stage. I'm more concerned about discovering a good way (or
> the best way) to link all our offices together. Reliability must be key.
> Secondarily, an allowance for generous data and high speed bandwidth should
> be considered.
>
> Looking forward to the discussion :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Hawken
> linkedin.com/in/AndrewHawken
>
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>
>
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